SOCIALIZE WITH US

That Time I Shot My Testicles Into My Lungs

By Dan Rubinsky

On a recent Saturday I woke up at 5:30 in the morning; it was 41 degrees outside and I was on my way to do Tough Mudder. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s an obstacle course where thousands of people voluntarily crawl in mud, climb over barriers, and run through electric fences. It isn’t a new concept – my grandparents did it, but back then it was called “being Jewish and getting out of Germany.”

Actually, it really isn’t that new of an idea. This incarnation
of a cooperative obstacle course was started by a British student in
2010 for his Harvard MBA business-school plan competition. Many claim
that he stole the idea from an ex-British soldier who started a 15-kilometer
midwinter mud run called Tough Guy back in 1987. Tough Guy in turn is
based on a British special-forces training course. Currently, there
are at least another half-dozen similar events with testosterone-inspired
names like Spartan Race, Warrior Dash, and Rugged Maniac.

Tough Mudder is hosted in different cities throughout the country
with people traveling from near and far to participate. Last month,
California hosted a Tough Mudder in Tahoe, but I traveled to a town
outside Seattle to do mine.

My day really started at 8 a.m., when the first 200 of us climbed
over a 10-foot wall to huddle in a pen near the starting gate. A DJ
warmed us up by shouting inspirational quotes he stole from the movie 300and the band House of Pain. He also
reminded us that this was not a race and that real Tough Mudders help each other finish.
In fact, these were central tenets of the organization and were emphasized
again and again in the pledge we had to take before we could even start
the course.

At 8:15 a.m., the smoke bombs went off and we started running through
the 12-mile course containing roughly 22 obstacles. The first one was
a mud crawl under barbed wire. I was able to make it through the 30
feet of mud singing “Ride of the Valkyries” from Apocalypse Now without getting my shirt
dirty or my back scratched. I accomplished this feat by having a strong
upper body and no ass.

This was going to be easy, I thought. I live in San Francisco, where
we train for these crazy-sounding races all the time. We do seven miles
at Bay to Breakers after a morning pint of Jack. What’s 12 miles sober?
We bike through dirt in drag at the Urban Outlaw Cyclocross Cross-Dressing
Series. What’s a little mud on our shorts and T-shirts? We surf at
ocean beach. We don’t even know what cold means.

At least this is what I thought going into Tough Mudder.

At mile two, I pulled my groin on the right side. At mile four, my
left leg locked up, causing me to run by swinging my leg while my overactive
inner monologue screamed, “Run, Forest, Run.” I taught my inner
monologue a lesson about a mile later by falling head first down a 12-foot
muddy embankment into a puddle of water. By mile seven I was in so much
pain I had to walk.

Of course, as we learned in the beginning, this was not a race, and
my friends said they wouldn’t leave me. I hate making people wait,
it makes me feel guilty. So for the next five miles, I alternated every
25 feet between limping and limping while pumping my arms to make it
seem like I was running.

At no point did I think about quitting. In truth, I couldn’t quit.
The 36-year-old me foolishly lets pride convince myself that I can live
with the pain of an experience like this but I can’t live with regret.

Beyond that, I was doing Tough Mudder so that the next time someone
bragged about how tough it was, I could say, “It wasn’t that hard.”
Solid logic, I know. Unfortunately, it’s this kind of mental deficiency
that pushes me to do just about everything in life.

As I pushed forward, there was one challenge I feared the most. The
Arctic Enema – an eight-foot long box filled four feet high with ice
and water. In theory, you jump into one side of the box, swim under
a submerged wooden board, and climb out the other side of the box. In
practice, I learned, your testicles shoot straight up and hit your lungs.

The obstacle right after is called the Electric Eel. Here you crawl
through mud while electric wires hang above you. If you touch the wires,
your prize is an electric shock. I was hit twice, but since I’d just
left the Arctic Enema, instead of feeling the intense pain of electric
currents running through my body, I simply didn’t feel numb.

Throughout the day I jumped off a 30-foot wall into a swimming pool,
climbed up a 30-foot wall because it was in front of me, and rolled
down a 30-foot hill because I was in too much pain to walk down it.

The final obstacle, and the one everyone talks about, is called Electric
Shock Therapy. This last one forces you to run through about eight feet
of unavoidable hanging wires that send electric shocks through your
body. Unfortunately, at this point I hadn’t just left a pool of ice
water and I felt every volt course through my body as I somehow ran
into every wire available. On the plus side, the Electric Shock Therapy
effectively cured all but three psychiatric ailments I suffer from.

At the end I was rewarded with a beer, a T-shirt, and an orange headband.

I can now check Tough Mudder off my bucket list, and while I won’t
do it again, next time someone brags about how tough
it was, I can say, “It wasn’t that hard” – although I’ll be
lying through my teeth.